Third-Party Twitter Apps Still Thriving

In unveiling changes to its API rules last week, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver claimed that according to the company’s data “90% of active Twitters users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.” Twitter defines “official” as applications it owns and operates for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone.

It was an assertion that captured the attention of Sysomos (a client) because previous studies done by the social media monitoring and analytics company suggested there were significantly more “non-official” users. In a June 2009 report, for example, it found TweetDeck had nearly 20% of the client market.

To determine usage of different Twitter clients, Sysomos reviewed a sample of 25 million tweets on March 11 – the day Twitter unveiled its new API policy. The data shows that 42% of tweets were made by non-officials apps – more than four times the amount claimed by Twitter.

Among the non-official group, the most popular apps were TweetDeck, UberSocial and Echofon, which are owned by Bill Gross’ UberMedia. Tweetdeck accounted for 5.5% of total tweets, compared with 19.9% in our June 2009 report.

UberMedia has emerged as rival to Twitter after building a large portfolio of Twitter-related services through acquisitions. Last month, Twitter suspended two of UberMedia’s services – UberTwitter and twitroyd – for “policy violations”.

So what’s disconnect between Twitter’s 90% claim, and Sysomos’ data analysis that shows Twitter only has 58% market share?

Here’s how the gap can be explained. Twitter’s number focus on the total number of users while Sysomos’ analysis looked at total tweets. It means there may be many Twitter “official” users who are not very active or do not tweet.

On the other hand, more enthusiastic and power users are using non-official services such as TweetDeck, UberSocial and Seesmic. This is not much of a surprise given many of these applications have many more features than Twitter.com despite recent improvements.